Camps Are Refuge, But Barely

July 18, 2004|By Emily Wax The Washington Post

MORNAY, Sudan — There are tents here that no parent wants to visit. They are called feeding centers, shady rectangular units where children fight death. Sitting on a mat and holding his son's frail hand, Mohammed Ishaq and his wife, Aisha, have been here for five days, nursing 9-month-old Zohar on drops of water from a large pink cup, praying that somehow he will survive.

Zohar spits up the water. His cough is rough, and his thin skin clings to his ribs. His withered left arm is connected to an IV. He is suffering from malaria, complicated by malnutrition. Near him, other parents rock, nurse and pray for their babies, who are passed out or moaning, their eyes rolled back as they vomit emergency rations of corn and oil.

Six hundred miles to the east in the capital, Khartoum, Mustafa Osman Ismail, the foreign minister of Sudan, stretched back in his plump leather chair in an air-conditioned office overlooking the Nile.

"In Darfur, there is no hunger. There is no malnutrition. There is no epidemic disease," he said in an interview. Yes, he conceded, there is "a humanitarian situation." But the hunger, he said, was "imagined" by the media.

Both hunger and denial are weapons in Sudan, according to U.N. officials and international aid workers. After accusing the government of imposing a policy of forced starvation on the people of Darfur, they now say that official attempts to conceal the crisis are endangering efforts to prevent famine among an estimated 2 million people.

Mornay is the largest refugee camp in the region. It is a labyrinth of suffering, where one child in five is acutely malnourished, aid workers say, where for six months 75,000 people have lived on less than half the food they need to survive, where six people die every day, mainly children and the elderly, from hunger and disease.

In the town of Mornay, near the camp, there is a market with no food. There is a tiny mosque where no one is praying, because 3,000 people are crammed into its dank and fetid spaces. There is arable land outside the camp, but crops cannot be gathered because militiamen on horseback, clad in government uniforms, roam the scrubby landscape. Assault rifles are balanced on their laps, and whips hang from their belt loops. Women are trapped inside the camp, unable to forage for firewood or food.

There are 129 such camps across Darfur, 31 of which are inaccessible because they are in areas held by the government or the rebels in the region, which stretches along the border of Chad. More than a million people live in the camps, many of which lack water, supplies and sanitation, and operate without any feeding centers.

"By denying that there is a humanitarian crisis, the government can continue phase two of its ethnic cleansing campaign," said John Prendergast, a former Clinton adviser on Africa and an analyst for the International Crisis Group, a research organization based in Brussels. "Phase one consisted of driving people out of their villages. Phase two is designed to use starvation and disease to finish the job started by the government-supported Janjaweed militias."

"If Khartoum is pressured to remove the obstacles, and the U.S., EU and U.N. vastly increase the airlift and delivery capacity for moving humanitarian supplies, hundreds of thousands of lives will be saved," he said. "Rarely in the history of these kinds of humanitarian emergencies is the choice so stark, so simple."

Rapes and attacks continue around the edges of the camp every night, women there said, as they rocked sickly babies with hollow eyes. Each week in Mornay, at least five women and girls as young as 12 have been raped when they left the camp, according to a report by Doctors Without Borders. The real number is thought to be far higher because many women are reluctant to report attacks.

With her 8-month-old malnourished twins at her breasts, Khadija Mohammed, 32, did not know how to help her children. Habiba was crying, and Hussein was passed out, unable to drink her milk. He has malaria, fevers at night, diarrhea and vomiting, his medical chart shows. His weight is half what it should be.

Mohammed came to the Mornay camp six months ago from her village in Ber Medina, 3 miles south. Her 6-year-old son and two brothers were killed.

"The nomads said, `Lie down on the ground.' One pointed his gun toward me. Then he aimed his gun up and started firing," she said.

Her 5-year-old daughter, Arfe, who has a halo of curly braids, was hit in the buttocks but survived. "Now she sometimes gets fever, she sometimes gets headaches. She has trouble walking," her mother said.

Arfe tried to help her mother with the twins and struggled to help lift Habiba. Her mother shook her head no and lifted her daughter's frayed yellow dress to show nine stitches, a scar and a bullet lodged in Arfe's right buttock.

"We are hungry here," she said. "But where else can we go? I am afraid."

Others in the camp also said they would not leave. Mohammed Ishaq, the father of tiny Zohar, said he couldn't leave even if he wanted to, because his son is too ill to be moved.

"I am very much afraid for my son," he whispered, looking at his child's hand, each tiny finger clinging to his. "I can't love him. He is too sick."

In the noon heat, Sandrine Normand, an exhausted-looking physician with Doctors Without Borders, ran her hand over Zohar's mother's back. She then took the pink cup from her hands and gently, drop by drop, tried to make the baby swallow the water.

There will be many funerals here soon, Normand said, crouching down to sit with Zohar's parents.